A Professional Looking Manuscript for Submission
You took great effort to write your manuscript. You’ve even had it professionally edited for errors of facts, typos and omissions. Now, it’s time to submit it. There are certain formats each publisher prefers. Make sure you study these before you submit your manuscript. However, keep in mind that publishers won’t consider a sloppy format for manuscripts no matter how great the writing may be. Role play this as if you Read the rest of this entry »

If you are writing for the web, there are many resources that can help you with research. Where you look for information and inspiration can have a big impact on the quality of your work. Here are ten of the best resources for any type of online writing.

1. Amazon.com -This is helpful for writers of both fiction and nonfiction. It’s especially good for informing you about what’s popular. Check the bestseller lists regularly.

Editing a blog post or short article can seem like a challenge, but in today’s world of short attention spans, multitasking and quick lunch breaks, time is money. A short article needs to deliver fast, accurate information, and a blog post needs to get to the heart of the message without weighing down the audience with extraneous words.

The most important thing to remember when editing a blog post or short article is this: ask yourself the main message you’re trying to send. Read the rest of this entry »

All the greats like King and Koontz and Rowling and Clancy tell you to write what you know. However, it’s highly unlikely that King and Koontz ever knew psychics who could set people on fire, pretty sure Rowling never went to any school of wizardry and Clancy isn’t some super-secret force recon operative.

When people tell you to write what you know, they are referring to the characters in the story and their reactions to the plot and situation. All good writers need to be willing to do a little research in order to make a story come to life.

When writing a work of non-fiction, doing your research improves credibility. When writing a work of fiction, research can make the action more believable and plausible. Regardless of what you’re writing, it pays to know what you’re talking about.

That goes for anything. Supernatural to wizards to even things that are a little less fantastical like childbirth. Heck, if you have a character or situation in your story that deals with something as seemingly ordinary and everyday as home improvement, you had better be willing to look up the information.

Because, whatever you’re writing about be it aliens or fixing a roof, if someone versed in these things is reading your story and spots a mistake, it’s going to color their impression of your story and yourself as a writer.

Many students or beginning writers wonder whether a writing guide can truly help them create their best work. Writers tend to eye guides with suspicion and concern because the rules with which guides are filled seem intimidating at best. The truth is, however, that writing guides can truly improve a manuscript, and students and authors should invest in one and use it frequently.

Quick and Easy RemindersWriter’s guides contain information about proper grammar and writing tips, and provide authors with Read the rest of this entry »

Writers everywhere want to know the answer to the universal question of how to keep their editors interested. An editor’s purpose is to help authors put out the best story or article possible, so losing an editor’s attention in a major problem.

Be UniqueOne common reason an editor loses interest is that the writing imitates another writer or is too similar to content already published. Authors must learn to stand apart, either by choosing an entirely new, Read the rest of this entry »

For an artist struggling to come up with a great theme, and the great opening for their article in a paper or magazine, the way to get out of the writers block, is to think of personal experiences to get your creative juices going. Not only will this help you come up with ideas to write, but thinking of a personal experience will also allow you to write a much more unique and interesting article, than if you were to just throw together a generic piece of literature out to the magazine, which any Read the rest of this entry »

Proofreading, the stage of writing where an author checks for errors, is one of the most difficult parts of writing. Even after authors re-read their work multiple times, errors in grammar, word usage, or sentence structure still slip past them. The following tips can help minimize errors to help authors get the most out of proofreading.

Take a BreakProofreading immediately after finishing a draft can cost authors because they are so familiar with what they’ve just written that their brains automatically correct the errors without throwing Read the rest of this entry »